Five ways to put your netbook to good use around the house

When you bring your netbook home for the night, do you plug it in and forget …

You've had a long day on the road and now you're back at home. So what do you do with your trusty netbook? If you're like a lot of users, you plug it in to recharge and then turn to your primary system, desktop or laptop, to finish out the day.

Netbooks are all about compromise, which means they have small screens, small keyboards, and less powerful processors. And yet, they remain perfectly adequate computers for anyone willing to work past those limitations. Netbooks can work just as well, if not better, at home at night as they do on the road during the day. Here are five ways to give your netbook a second life in the evening.

Portable music

You probably won't sync your entire music collection to your netbook, particularly if you own one with limited disk space. With their WiFi functionality, netbooks can be a great client for shared music libraries. You can stream through software like iTunes or listen to online music services like Pandora. When you're in your family room or working out on the treadmill, a netbook simplifies bringing your music with you. Plug in the netbook, connect it to your stereo or headphones, and you instantly have access to your entire networked music library.

As long as you remain in WiFi range, think beyond the family room. You can take that music to your bathroom or hot tub. Think about using your netbook as a sound system to enjoy while soaking in your Jacuzzi, for example. Of course, it would be best if your bathroom or deck were big (and if you own a Jacuzzi, that's probably a given), with good ventilation and a stable, dry area with easy access to external speakers. The built-in netbook speakers are usually pretty tinny (although they can be more powerful than you expect), but you can always keep an inexpensive pair of speakers around.

Second computer for spouse or kids

When it comes to netbook computing limitations, nearly every human usability problem can be solved by plugging in accessories. Screen too small? Plug into an external monitor (netbooks like the Acer AspireOne and Dell Inspiron Mini 9 have VGA ports). Keyboard too awkward? Add a USB solution. Docking your netbook into these devices lets you treat your unit as a fully capable second computer.

None of these accessories have to be cutting-edge either. Many people already have a spare monitor and keyboard sitting around their house. This makes the cost outlay for a permanent netbook home-base almost vanishingly small. A docked netbook may not offer the highest-end, real-time gaming platform, but it gives you a great place to check mail, surf the Internet, and more. Create a few user accounts on your netbook so no one is messing with your data and the netbook can divert your family away from your primary system and help shoulder part of your Internet load.

Media center

Most netbooks are compatible with a variety of USB TV tuners and perfectly capable of driving large TV-sized displays. When you bring your netbook home for the night, why not let it watch TV for you? Reasonably priced tuners and software exist for most operating systems that run on netbooks. They allow you to connect your netbook to your cable system or record free-to-air broadcasts. And you can even take your recordings with you on the road the next day, to watch during your long bus or train commute.

Sure, there are two obvious drawbacks. First, any media center you set up this way only works during the time your netbook is connected, typically from the early evening into the morning. Of course, that's the time period during which most of the shows you want to watch will be shown. So for most people, you're not really missing out on prime recording time.

Second, recording video relies on netbooks that offer more than 4 or 8GB of storage, and are best used with hard-drive-equipped netbooks rather than flash-based devices. If you're clever though, and can set up an external USB drive solution that stores just the most recent recording to your netbook, a netbook media center can work with even the most limited memory systems. Just two gigabytes is more than enough space to store a couple of hours of TV and get you through that commute.

Kitchen computing

For years, people have gone on and on about the "kitchen computer" being the future of the Internet, to the point that it has become almost a joke. And yet, netbooks make excellent kitchen systems. Their especially small form factor lets them easily fit on a cluttered counter while offering a big enough screen that you can display a recipe while you prepare dinner.

Kitchens are a great place to let your netbook recharge and be ready for the next morning. At the same time, you can access the Internet, listen for new e-mail, or keep up an intermittent instant messaging session, all while doing your standard meal prep and clean-up.

Social appliance

As much as you love constantly keeping up with your friends online, and I'm sure you do, carrying a laptop around with you while you watch your kids bike on the street just isn't going to happen. Netbooks, though, are small enough to sit at your side as you keep up parent duty from your front porch. With a decent home WiFi network and the built-in video camera that ships with many netbooks, you can divide your time between parental supervision and video chatting with your nearest and dearest.

Netbooks make great social tools because they let you bring along your networks in a very small form factor. You can Tweet, you can AIM, you can vlog, all without being tied to a desk or even a room. You can do all this while getting chores done. These kinds of interpersonal interactions might not represent the way you use your netbook during the day, but when you're on your home turf, the netbook can take on a new role as a social appliance, and offer a way to distract you from daily tediums.